


Contemplation, and a Return to the Old Ways

by BlueLightningAndNexus



Series: My DC Universe [2]
Category: DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: And the superhero life never quite stops, Angst, Angst and Feels, Character Study, Flashbacks, Old Friends, Psychological Drama, Retirement is never permanent in DC Comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23215120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueLightningAndNexus/pseuds/BlueLightningAndNexus
Summary: Part of My DC Universe series.Dick was only with the Titans for a couple of months before he split off and went to Bludhaven. He became a cop--one of the best--and for a time, abandoned the Nightwing mantle he had spent so long trying to build.It's been a year since that happened. In that time, he hasn't made contact with Bruce, Kori, Barbara, anyone. And then one night, he feels the familiar temptation of the mask...Set in 2014, a couple years after the Justice League formed.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson
Series: My DC Universe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1669048
Kudos: 9





	Contemplation, and a Return to the Old Ways

“You’re better than you know,” the voice told him. Ominous and eerie, yet close and kind, all at once; unforgettable. 

“I’m not going to tell you what choice to make.” The figure was tall and dark, illuminated in the shadows, blending with the black stone behind him. He gave off an aura of mysterious power, of control, and yet of expression and comfort, all blending together. 

“But I’ll tell you this: you are destined for amazing things.”

“Is this why you took me in?” The boy asked, finding his voice; wavering, near-breaking and soft, as if he had been crying. 

“No.” The figure got down on one knee. He has now at the boy’s height, looking face-to-face into his milky pale eyes. Pale as snow. 

“I helped you because I wanted to, and I knew that you could help other people. I helped you because I saw myself in you.”

The boy started to cry again, not out of anxiety and worry and shame, but out of relief and joy; he finally belonged. His whole world had collapses, vanished into oblivion; things would never be the same again, that he knew. But at least this figure, this friend, would help him through things. As small drops of moisture fell onto his olive skin, the boy knew that this silent, gentle protector was doing everything in his power to make him feel safe and whole. 

The man took off his mask and lightly put both of his gloved, plated hands on the boy’s thin shoulders. Underneath his mask, out of the peaceful shadows and into the calming light, Bruce Wayne looked at the boy with his kind, azure eyes. 

“I can never replace what you once had. But I can help you, and I can make you feel better, and I will try my best to take care of you and make you feel as if you belong.” His voice was different than the boy had heard before; a steely dedication and determination absorbed into his words. He was prepared to help this child, this smaller reflection of him, at all costs. “You don’t need to do this, but I see inside of you the infinite capacity for good.”

Pulling him in for a hug, Bruce wrapped his muscular arms around the child. 

“It will be alright. I promise.”

________________________________

I promise…

Dick Grayson woke up in a cold sweat. 

He bolted upright in his cramped twin-sized bed, breathes shallow and swift, his thin yet muscular, heavily scarred chest rising and falling rapidly. Eyes darting across the shadows of his room, his mind relaying the events that he just witnessed, Dick grabbed a handful of his black hair, drenched with sweat. Only a dream, he thought. It was only a dream. 

But it wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory. A memory of a different time. A time he could never return to. 

Rain was pouring against the window, against all of Bludhaven. It was a storm tonight, and the news said it would be some of the most rainfall the city had seen in years. Without even thinking about the gesture, Dick’s weary eyes traced the dark closet in the corner of the room, hidden by darkness and secured by worry. 

Dragging his legs off the bed, his toes slowly touching the cold floor of his bedroom, Dick pulled himself onto his feet, gaze falling to his bedside table. His phone, plugged into a nearby outlet, read 2:38. He only got 3 hours of sleep. The light from the device’s screen illuminated the small, framed photo on his table. His photo of Barbara. 

She looked greatly relaxed in the old photo. Strands of fiery red hair were falling out of her trademark messy, simplistic bun, covering her aqua eyes and rectangular glasses. She gave a small smile, genuine and comfortable, at whoever was on the other end of the camera (which was Tim, if memory serves right). Dick was kneeling down next to her, a bright, toothy grin on his face. He let out a chuckle as he observed the picture, specifically his own appearence; that was back when he was still keeping his hair trimmed short, as opposed to the shoulder-length locks he had now. 

A crack of lightning tugged him back to reality. Solemnly putting the photo back on his table, Dick’s eyes found his way to the miserable desk in the corner of his room, covered with supplies. Objects clouded in the darkness, silhouettes of pencils, notebooks, a radio, a police badge, a casing of ammo. Behind these was a stack of four folders, all taken from the station, all cases he was doing. One of the was a cold case for an assault that only got recently reopened when a rookie detective started looking back into it; two were murder cases, and his sergeant was looking into the possibility they were related and asked Dick to look into it. And the final one? Paragon, a new criminal to the town. Apparently, he was some novice villain from Metropolis that got put away by Superman one too many times, came here, and started assimilating technology, both from official laboratories and other criminal gangs. 

Dick sighed. He wasn’t going to get anymore sleep tonight. He was already too wide awake, mind immediately racing with details he recalled from that enigmatic fourth folder; even if it wasn’t, he could never sleep in storms. He might as well do some work. 

Switching on his desk lamp and plugging in the old police tracker, Dick set the tracker to the standard frequency, listening to whatever his coworkers on the night watch were saying. After a few seconds of crackling static, he heard something: 

“—20! I repeat, A code 220 on 49th on 13th!”

Assault with intent to mayhem. 

Pulling out the bottom folder, the one relating to this new villain, Dick cracked it open. Upon doing so, some of the dust got knocked off of the ancient file for that cold case, releasing it into the air of the stuffy apartment, diffusing and causing a series of light coughing in Dick. 

“240 on Diamond Street!”

Code 240: Assault. 

Collecting his breath for a moment, Dick started reading the file. Apparently, the methods this guy uses to get his technology were all over the place; sometimes hacking, sometime stealth, sometimes more straightforward and physical approaches. He was only identified as a singular individual because of security cam footage, eye witness accounts from a family, and a positive identification from a cellmate. 

Dick reached over and grabbed a mechanical pencil and two sheets of notebook paper. He meant to get to work: brainstorming ideas for why Paragon needed technology, if there were any connections back in Metropolis, if there was any connection in the victims, if the cellmate had any connection. Did he plan to get spotted? No, more likely than not, these were random flukes; he wasn’t as professional as other organized criminals. Besides, if he wanted to get identified, why not be seen by the security cameras every time? It made more sense that he was simply sloppy. 

Trying to focus on the file, he barely even noticed another string of codes, all from different officers, overlapping with one another:

“We need help on 49th and 13th!”

A different person from the first time. God, he thought, why am I doing this to myself? I should be sound asleep. 

“242, assailant fleeing to Cinder Street!”

Assault, but this time with battery. The second voice again. 

I should be asleep. I should be focusing on this file, not the police tracker. 

But he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off; he didn’t have it in him, for whatever reason. Instead, Dick simply leaned out of his chair and turned the tracker down enough that he could still read the file without interruption. 

Racking his sleep-deprived brain for other information, Dick felt frustrated. If he could simply confront this guy in person, his whole job would be way easier. 

Unless…

NO! He mentally screamed. I’ve been doing this long enough, no reason to quit now. 

But he couldn’t daydream or fantasize about those kind of things, not tonight: he was going to be very busy. He was always busy these days; surges of crime, resurgence of old villains, disappearances and injuries of his coworkers. Bludhaven was becoming Gotham. And Dick was becoming Bruce. 

Immediately, anger fizzled in Dick’s thoughts. His mind flashed back to that fateful argument with Bruce oh so many months ago. He wanted to punch something right now, but he knew in his heart that the thin walls of his apartment couldn’t take it, and his landlady would never forgive him. 

Trying to distract himself, he turned the volume back up on the police tracker. He recalled the words exchanged with his mentor, occurring to him in irregular streams of intermittent recollections:

I’m not just some sidekick you can order around, I’m your partner!

“Situation has escalated to a 10-80, I repeat, situation has escalated to a 10-80!”

Sometimes I wish you never took me in! 

“Code 459!”

You infuriate me!

Arson, then burglary, in that order. 

In these memories, these blips of conversations, he sometimes had trouble telling who was speaking. He wanted to stop remembering, to stop thinking. He tried to focus on the tracker, but it was only driving him crazy. The thing that stuck out about that night, that fateful, tragic, stupid night at Wayne Manor, the thing that stuck out like a crystal-clear sore thumb, was the last thing that Dick said to Bruce. 

I don’t want to be anything like you!

Even more unsettling was Bruce’s response, anger fading into morbid disappointment: “You’re already like me.”

Slamming his hand against the lamp, shutting it off (and probably breaking the damn thing), Dick glared out at the window. Rain was pouring down, harder than when he first woke up. He could see his reflection against the window, a faded mirror; his arching scowl, his normally light eyes consumed with a darkness, hair, still moist with sweat at the ends, hanging in front of his face. 

Instinctively, Dick’s eyes turned back to the closet he never dared open; the closet he walked by every single evening and tried to avoid every time he came into this tiny bedroom. The dream played in his head as a feedback loop:

“You’re better than you know.”

Against his better judgement and all logic, Dick suddenly found himself in front of this closet. He gently extended his open hand towards one of the brass knobs to the closet. His middle finger grazed the tip of the metal orb, and without thinking, he retracted his hand, as if he just touched something unspeakably hot that burned his flesh. 

But that wasn’t the case. He had nothing to physically overcome with this object, but his mental blocks on the idea were stronger than anything in the physical world. 

Turn around, he wanted to tell himself, go back to your desk and open up that file again. Maybe go back to your bed. Get some sleep before the sun rises. You’ll certainly need it in a few hours. The voice made some good points, but his passion and instincts were eternally stronger. Come on, he practically begged himself. It was as if his very being had split in two: his mind dueling with his body over what to do. 

We can’t relapse, not like this, he told himself. He had been tempted to get the mask on before; what was different this time? 

He didn’t know, but frankly, he didn’t care. He knew in the depths of his heart that this was what he wanted. Even without all of the training, all of the time with Bruce and Alfred in Gotham, all of the time as Robin, he knew he was completed by his other identity. Not necessarily happy, or satisfied, but whole. 

He stopped struggling. He stopped resisting against what he knew he wanted. He placed his hand firmly on that elusive brass sphere, and threw the closet door open. 

Looking back at him was the outfit, exactly as he left it: militaristic plates of black armor with blue streaks running down, his Escrima sticks to the side, unused and collecting dust, forming a cross on which his thin domino mask resided. The white eyes of that mask looked back at him, reminding Dick of his dream. 

“Why isn’t anyone fucking answering! We need help!” a man on the police radio cried. 

He didn’t dwell on the thought of his dream for too long. Throwing off his shorts and grabbing the suit, he slipped it on as if this wasn’t the first time he went out on patrol in three months. Before his mind could remind him why they gave up fighting crime and remind him that they don’t want to be anything like Bruce, Dick positioned the mask onto his face, balancing the extension of it over his nose until the pale lenses covered his eyes. 

He took a moment to look back out at the window. Seeing his reflection looking back at him in the rain, Dick felt more alive than he had in months. 

Switching off the police tracker, Dick grabbed his Escrima sticks and utility belt and wrapped his fingers around the metal handle to his window. 

Are you sure you want to do this? He asked himself. 

Hesitating for a moment, before looking out at his reflection again, Dick witnessed a smile on his mouth for the first time in weeks. 

More than ever. 

Turning to his memories of Bruce and his words of encouragement, Dick pulled onto the handle, the wind almost instantly throwing the window open. Before he even knew what was happening, he stepped out into the rain. 

With that, Nightwing was back.  
__________________________________

“Are you sure about this?”

The rain was pouring down the boy’s shivering face, the cold reducing the air of his words to a cold mist as they exited his mouth and dissipated into the night. 

“Of course,” his gruff partner replied, loading several industrial-crates into the back of the black truck. “We can’t back out now, even if we wanted to.” Staring down the shorter silhouette, his onyx eyes narrowed in anger in a silent threat behind his thick hockey mask; the mask of a criminal. 

“You do still want to do this, don’t you Powell?” He asked, puffing out his chest in a ‘macho’ fashion, making a show out of doing so and moving his bulky, clothed arm to the side to reveal the fully-loaded Glock hanging off his belt. 

“Y-yeah, of course,” his partner stammered. “But d-don’t y-you—“ 

“For fuck’s sake would you stop stammering!” the larger man bellowed, his voice echoing off the walls of the alley and dying in the loudness of the rain. 

“R-right,” the boy meekly replied. “But won’t the police realize what’s happening?” he questioned as his partner grabbed another crate, loading it on top of the previous and completing another stack of supplies. 

“Of course not, fucking idiot,” he scoffed. “Weren’t you paying attention? All those explosions were to distract the police, so we could get these weapons from the boss.” 

Putting the final crate, soaked with rainwater, into the truck, before slamming the two doors shut and knocking water off into his masked face, the larger of the two turned back to his shorter counterpart. 

“C’mon now, we need to rendezvous with everyone else.”

Nodding timidly, the boy started walking through puddles of cold liquid, lightning flashes illuminating a nimble figure on the rooftops.  
Before could even realize what was happening, the figure leaped down on top of the larger man, using his body as a launching pad to kick him into the brick wall. His head slammed into the wall, and knocking him out cold as the rain. 

“We thought you was gone!” The boy shouted, reaching for his revolver. Before his finger even met the trigger, a metallic stick flew at top speed through the rain and meeting his head, dissipating consciousness from his body, the impact of the stick sending it in the opposite direction and right back into Nightwing’s hand. 

___________________________________

“Ugh, I despise this weather,” the pyro technician muttered, droplets of water falling down her flame-resistant mask and obscuring her vision. “It’s the hardest to work in.” 

Readying her detonation device and trying her best to cover it from the rain with an extended arm, her bodyguard, a tall woman with short black hair and a Ruger Blackhawk handgun firmly in her grasp. 

“Yeah, yeah, stop your whining,” the guard replied, head moving from left to right and back again as she looked out for the familiar red-and-blue flashes of light in the rain, all while mentally plotting a potential escape route if they were caught. “With rain this bad, no one can even see us. Even if the police do get here earlier, we’ll have an easier time getting away.” Seeing as the two of them perched upon the lower level of a construction site in midtown Bludhaven, even if cops did notice them, they would still have a short frame of time to make their way out of the building and away from any officers. 

“If we were more organized, we wouldn’t need to rely on this weather for cover,” the pyro technician retorted. 

“Hey, don’t take it up with me, I’m not in charge of this operation, I’m just here to keep you safe, and you’re only here as a diversion so the cops don’t realize what the Boss has planned. Now would you shut your trap and just get to working already?”

The pyro technician rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the device in front of her. “It’s almost ready, just need another second.”

Prying open the latches to her bomb and securing it onto the stabilizing scarlet steel pillar of the site, she wiped some moisture from her mask and turned around, the small phone-sized trigger to the device in her gloved hand. 

“Alright, let’s get out of here and head back, then we can detonate this on the ride back to base.”

No answer. 

“Lieutenant? Are you here at all?”

No answer. Again. 

However, there was a small Ruger Blackhawk handgun laying on the ground, its user nowhere in sight. Panic flooding her system, the technician rushed forward and grabbed the handgun, making sure to keep a grip on both her own sanity and the trigger. 

“Hey! I know someone’s out there! Where are you!”

Pointing the barrel of the gun frantically in the direction of every sound she heard, the technician briefly turned her gaze back to the bomb, shaking in fear as she did so. It’s still secure. Screw her, I gotta get out of here and get home. 

She only turned around for a moment, but when she did so, she was faced by a tall figure, hidden in rain and shadows. 

“There!”

Without thinking, she fired a shot from the handgun, but the figure was too fast; predicting when she would fire, he ducked in the split second beforehand and started rushing forward. Before the girl had a moment to fire a second shot into his chest and pump him full of lead, he was already on top of her, delivering a devastating roundhouse kick into her temple. 

The girl instantly lost consciousness, the gun and the triggering device for the bomb falling out of her hands and into those of Dick Grayson.  
___________________________________

He should have been exhausted; he was running on a couple hours of sleep and little else. He should have been injured already; he already snuck up on a dozen of Blockbuster’s men, each armed with bombs, knives and every assortment of handguns. He should have slipped in the rain and plummeted to his death; but Dick didn’t. 

Moving faster than he had in weeks, he was surprised to find he was barely even out of breath. Sprinting across the wet building tops at full speed, his Nightwing suit snuggly and comfortably fitting him, helping to cushion the impact of many of his jumps; he couldn’t even stop himself from moving. 

So, this must be what Wally feels like every day, he thought with a smirk. 

Leaping off the edge of this rooftop and flying through midair to another, a glowing smile illuminated Dick’s entire presence. 

I’m never giving this up again, he thought to himself. 

___________________________________________

Dick’s entire body ached the next day.  
When all was said and done, he only got an hour of sleep before he went to work, but he barely even felt tired. He felt alive, like some kind of zombie in those old movies he watched with the Titans that got suddenly rejuvenated. 

__________________________________

Dick remembered when Barbara first got glasses. It was only a few weeks after they first became friends, and only a few months after Bruce formally took in Dick. Looking back, Dick was such an awkward child, still calling Bruce things like “Sir” and “Mr. Wayne”. (For comparisons sake, in the months before he left Gotham, Dick would only ever call Bruce “Sir and “Mr. Wayne” as a joke just to elicit giggles from Gar and Kori). There was even that one time that Dick tried out “Dad” and immediately regretted it because he felt like he was betraying his own parents. Coupled with the look of sheer shock and confusion on Bruce and Alfred’s face and the wooden, semi-stern lecture that Bruce gave him after; Dick resolved to never call Bruce such a title in his lifetime. 

Dick recalled attending Gotham Academy with Barbara, the two developing a strange closeness due to frequently being with Bruce on patrol. She only barely got into Gotham Academy (a school notoriously filled with snobbish, self-centered rich kids who never worked a day in their life and never would but excelled in academics nonetheless) because her father was commissioner, and even then, the elitist school board members were always breathing down her neck. Despite the rough start, she quickly proved herself, becoming an Honors Student and president of her 10th grade class. 

He was still in 8th grade at the time, a child for all intents and purposes, and completely unfamiliar with the intense curriculum of Gotham’s upper-class. There was little adjusting from his online home schooling to the grueling classes of the best public school money could buy on this side of the Mississippi; and Dick often required Barbara’s assistance in his courses. 

Things seemed to be doing fine at first, but when Barbara started having trouble reading Dick’s textbooks, her father began to suspect that something was amiss. Jim insisted for months and months that she go to an eye doctor and get some tests done, but Barbara relented, for what seemed like no apparent reason to her father than teenage stubbornness. In actuality, Barbara had no idea how she would  
wear glasses with her Batgirl costume. 

She refused to tell Bruce about these problems. For the world’s greatest detective, he had quite a bit of trouble figuring out the problem; but that isn’t to say he never noticed. When Barbara would stumble after jumping across a building-top, she would quickly present the slip as a result of cramps, and Bruce would send her home. If she had trouble aiming her grappling hook, she would chalk up her difficulty to the bitter cold, and Bruce would update her costume with more heat-insulating layers. If she missed a target with a Batarang, she would pretend she had some dust in her eye and move on. 

Finally, these troubles all culminated in a small robbery. Nothing serious, just a jewelry shop getting broken into early in the night while Bruce and Barbara were around. Quickly suiting up, the two set out to stop the burglars in question…

…Only for Barbara to get stabbed. 

Now, granted, the knife only “nicked” her side, but part of the blade slipped into a gap between the chinks of her armor and sliced her diaphragm; before too long, Barbara felt the warm trail of crimson liquid dripping down her chest. Instantly, Bruce took her to a hospital (making sure to knock out her opponent, then punch him twice in his unconscious face, than an extra three times for good measure), calling her father along the way. The two fabricated the story that they were caught up in some mugging. (Not too far from what actually transpired. After all, every good lie is rooted in the truth.)

Barbara privately admitted to Bruce she had trouble seeing the knife as it was coming at her and disclosed that she had vision problems for the last several weeks, but she didn’t want to say anything for fear that Bruce would fire her. Bruce went through all the stages of grief, but in his own little way: anger (at her), anger (at himself), sadness, anger (at Barbara and himself), apologizing for getting angry, giving her an awkward pat on the shoulder while she was crying (to assure her that she wouldn’t be fired and he wasn’t angry anymore), then buying her some glasses and adding lenses to her cowl. 

Dick recalled how rapidly Barbara seemed to adapt to her new spectacles (which, admittedly, made her look marginally cuter, at least in Dick’s opinion). He recalled something she said after the event: 

“I didn’t quite realize how bad things had gotten. It’s as if a light had been slowly dimmed until I couldn’t tell that I was in pitch-black darkness. When I finally got my glasses, it turned on a light and let me see properly for the first time. I could always see, but not as well as I am now.”

Dick didn’t think about her statement for years. But in hindsight this was exactly how he felt after putting the Nightwing costume back on. 

He didn’t realize he was dying of thirst until he got a taste of that life again.

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely one of the more contemplative stories I've written, that's meant to examine how addictive the superhero lifestyle can be, and how you can truly never let go of the rush that comes with saving people and beating up the bad guys. 
> 
> This is set at least a year before anything else in this series of mine, hence the hints that he still is hung up on Barbara.


End file.
